Creative musings in bright colors

Posts tagged ‘Revlon’

Oops! I meant to post this on Friday but I ended up accidentally throwing a party instead and forgot. Sorry! Anyway, This was just a fun little floral! Fitting for almost-summer.

The new polish here is called Morgan by Zoya. What you see here is three thin coats, although I could have gotten away with two thicker coats. This is a bright blue-leaning pink, and it is quite pretty! I have been hunting for more medium tone pink cremes, and although this one is slightly darker than I was hoping for, the color borders on neon and it was fun to wear.

This features another of the Zoya polishes that I bought to replace an existing polish; in this case my favorite mid-tone pink is simply empty. I tried to use it on my thumb and couldn’t get enough out of the bottle (although I did end up using a tiny sample size pink that is almost identical for comparison) Unlike my pale pink adventure, this pink polish is not nearly as close in color, nor is it as easy to use!

On my pinky, middle, and pointer fingers I have 3 thick coats of Zoya Kitridge. As it is touted on the website as a “5” and thus totally opaque, this polish is a lot more jelly-like than it should be! It was also supposed to be a bright “barbie” pink, but I honestly think it is too pale for that. It is a pretty enough color, but not what I was looking for! I also have two thin coats of Bubbly by Revlon on my ring finger, and a weird mix on my thumb (one coat of Pink Forever by Sinful Colors before it finally dried up, and one coat of Pinkini by Clinique which is an almost identical color). Regardless, Kitridge is too pale!

Then I went wonky. I decided to make a pink-to-red gradient, but I used a bright red rather than a dark red, and Kitridge is not opaque enough to gradient over Bubbly! So my poor ring finger just does not match. I ended up doing a kind of fun stamp up the middle of the gradient, but honestly I should have picked different colors!

So, overall, this manicure was a bit of a disaster. I blame Kitridge…I had a whole thing planned with a darker pink but it was not going to work with a medium-light pink! *sigh* I wish there were more comparisons on the internet, but at this point there are probably millions of shades and finishes of nail polish and that would be far too much to ask!

I don’t know where I was going with this mani, or why it makes me think of Pink Floyd, but here we are! Not another neon brick in the wall. Of course, in this particular scenario the bricks are truly pink and the grout is teal.

This mani was a bit of a mess. I started with a teal base, and then stamped a pink gradient over it. However, the pink did not come out as brightly as I wanted (in retrospect I should have used white first) so I stamped the same gradient again to brighten the color. Which worked…but since I used a different part of the stamp and frequently a different orientation on each nail, getting the same gradient was really difficult! I then decided it wasn’t pink enough so I added some Magician free-handed over the pink. So now there is also glitter.

In the end I wish I had just used striping tape. Generally that would take longer, but with how much time I spent on these I doubt it! I also messed up my thumb, I decided to add bright pink dots for no apparent reason. So you don’t get to see much of my poor weird-looking thumb.

Today is also a sad day, because my husband and I finally put in an offer for a (wonderful) house, and someone out-competed us (buy paying in cash, which is remarkable). I am sad! It had a perfect little nail art room and everything.

Honestly, my nails were too long (that never happens!) for the nail art I was trying to create here! So I improvised a bit. I think the original might be better! It also kinda looks like one chevron (the black one) was bolded in my version, so voila, title!

The design was inspired by Penelope Luz, but her version is beautifully minimalist. Mine has more color. And glitter.

These are one of my favorite nail designs that I have done recently (…that was not in the 31 Day Challenge, which is where I usually put my favorites). It is a bit of the wrong season, but it was 70 degrees out yesterday so it totally still feels almost-tropical! Basically I love these and I wanted to post them now :-p

These nails are based around water decals from the Born Pretty Store: all the leaves are decals! Which is absolutely amazing because they have white backgrounds and beautiful cut out edges and show up perfectly against a dark green base. I love when I don’t have to use a white base for water decals!!

The flowers I added by hand, because what is a mani with fun leaves without a few dotted petals? I like how colorful it is 🙂 but really I cannot wait to use the rest of these decals, maybe in spring when it is appropriate! But who knows. Snow leaves? I can make that a thing, perhaps!

Hope you enjoyed these tropical nails in the Fall! I think the rest of this month will be a bit more Autumn-themed. I even have some pumpkins! October rather snuck up on me thought, so I only really have one Halloween manicure (which, the holiday is next week, how did that happen)! Hopefully I remember next year in advance and can put together some more fun seasonal manis :-p Anyway, these decals are currently on sale for $1.59 for a set of three sheets, and I strongly recommend them.

Is this really pastiche? Not so much. A lot of my nail art apes that of other artists that I’ve seen and liked…this was sort of a general “I like things that are somewhat pastel and look like watercolor and flowers” and I tried to make it happen!

It turns out, of course, that I also like things that glitter. The end result of this mani was actually pretty fun, but I just kept adding more things! Lines and more lines and dots…In the end I wish I had used a lighter silver holo base for my accent nail, but I love the pink shine to Rosewater!

I was torn whether to post this for flower day or color day, and I realized that the whole purpose of this mani was that it was pink. Lots of pink. And a few colors that go well with pink, like gold and white. So voila! Inspired by the color pink and things one wears with pink.

The design was inspired by Nails by Erin. However, when I finished trying to mimic her, I decided I didn’t like how boring my white nails were! And as previously mentioned, gold looks good with pink, so I added some gold glitter to the top of my all-white nails, and I kinda love it!

My only real complaint about this mani is that I used red striping tape to make the negative space lines and it kinda bled? So my naked nails look a little red-der than usual and the white has a red tinge. Oh well! Still looks cool :-p

I am kind of amazed that the 31 Day Challenge is almost over! I remember this being a LOT harder to keep up with…but then again this is the only year that I didn’t post daily. This M-W-F posting schedule really makes my life at lot easier! And hopefully I can keep it up. Thus far in residency no one has made a fuss about my colorful nails (then again, I haven’t been painting rainbows or neons yet).

How about something pink and gold? I figure with the flowers it is suitably summer-y too!

The design was inspired by Nails by Erin but my pink base is an AWFUL polish that takes 3 coats and never dries (I need a better barbie pink) and so I wanted to do more things with those nails. I don’t know if this counts as over doing it, but I actually liked it!

Using Erin’s nails as a template got me very excited about gold dots. I love adding dots to things. In this case, added too many gold dots to things…specifically my middle finger. Oops. it would have looked better with more white space 😀

I have to admit, I had no idea the rabbit hole I was getting myself into when I made these. I saw a pin that I liked on pinterest, and just decided to re-create it.

Then of course I decided to use more neon colors that the original (which may have been a mistake since, again, these were worn to see patients), and since my nails were longer I went ahead and added a flair of double lines on my nails. The doubles were only on my left hand, my right hand recently had a collision with a car door and thus has short nails.

But this is where it got nuts…I went to go find the original poster of the nail art design. And this woman has made SO MANY of these. The original mani (and the one I used as inspiration) was posted to @amvpnails over 3 years ago. Then, a few weeks later she posted a similar design with gold/pink colors. Then she seems to have noticed how popular they were and did one in blues, reds, more neons, and dark rainbows. That is a LOT of repeats! I cannot imagine repeating one design that many times, even with the color variations.

Happy Monday! No really, I mean it. Today is a good day because I start on an elective block tomorrow which means I get such things like WEEKENDS and NOT WORKING 30 HOUR CALL SHIFTS. It’s amazing. Anyway, on to nail art! In celebration of my new found freedom, this week I’m going to be posting some recent favorites that I’ve saved up, starting with this sparkly floral piece!

The base polish here is two thin coats of Holidazed Over You by OPI. This polish is a very very dark blue creme…so dark it is basically black. That said, the polish is almost a one coater! I always need more super opaque blacks (even if this IS blue), and having one in a tiny mini bottle will be useful, even if I’m just going to pretend it’s black. Oh well!

I then went and covered the polish with holographic iridescent foil from the Born Pretty Store. Most of my foil is single sheets, but this particular pattern is an entire roll! This is great because the design is fairly awesome: an array of dots with a rainbow shifting wave running through! As I tilt my nails the swirl shifts up, down, left, and right. The rainbows are incredible! I got 98% dot transfer which is really impressive. I did add a few of the missing dots using a silver metallic polish, but I think across all 5 nails I only had to add maybe 10 dots total? So win for both the foil and the foil glue!

In my continuing need to test all things related to using foil on my nails, I went hunting for a way to make foil manis last longer. The last time I used foil, I only covered it with aqua base (water-based base coat intended for some persnickety holographic polishes…and the only water-based anything that I own, unfortunately) and in the shower the whole thing started to crack and flake off! Which means it worked great for about 5 hours and then became kinda really ugly. So, this time I covered with Seche Vite after the aqua base…. and it totally worked! The aqua base seems to protect the finish and shimmer of the foil, while Seche Vite does its job and protects the mani from such hazards as water and daily life.

I kinda wish I had taken a video (not that I actually know how to get them onto the blog, but still) just so you guys could see the shifty wave pattern. It was fun! But then I decided it wasn’t enough.

I for some reason really wanted to throw on some roses over the dots! I was initially going to use layered stamping, but all the rose plates that I have contain flowers that were larger than I wanted to go with…so freehand roses it was! It’s been a while since I last freehanded flowers (yet somehow the posts I’ve put together for the next few weeks have a lot of flowers? I don’t know, I guess I lump them together thematically. Anyway), and these came out pretty good for all that I am out of practice!

That’s all for today! You can pick up the roll of shifty holographic dot foil for 99 cents at the Born Pretty Store. I am super a fan! Then all you need is some freehand roses and voila! Super fun mani, if I do say so myself. Hope you enjoyed!

Dark Purple: What makes a dark purple rather than a purple? I don’t know. These just seemed darker. Except one (which is obvious) and I couldn’t fit anywhere. All of these polishes have problems of their own however!

So. Delaney took three coats while the rest took two, and obviously does not fit. I don’t like this polish even thought I don’t own any dupes, so it is a goner! For the other three, it is a bit more difficult. I love the color of Talk, but the purple is sooo vibrant that any time I try to do nail art over it, the purple bleeds through (I know it looks blue here, I swear it is a purple). I can put down two coats of top coat and use a metallic silver and the silver will still turn purple! Violets is a very pretty polish which I would love to use more (just look at that hidden shimmer) but it SMELLS. I don’t know why anyone puts scents in their polish, if I wanted to wear perfume I would! Ugh. So awesome color but it smells like terrible fake flowers. Ink I really like, I am just sad that the pink-purple shimmer that is so evident in the bottle is not as clear on the nails. Either way, I am ditching Delaney and keeping the rest, although I want to replace Violets with a similar color that doesn’t have a smell! Pooh to you, Revlon.

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Purple Metallics: I love metallics, and in case the number of polishes shown today didn’t make it clear, I love purple metallics. There is just something about the shimmer in purple (be it red or blue leaning) that is so darn pretty! That said, I know one I am parting with!

One of these things is not like the others…and it’s the OPI. There just isn’t as much depth to Chemis-tree as there is to the Zoyas! And wow are all the Zoyas beautiful. I had thought that Iris would be a dupe for Isadora, but even with top coat (Iris is a matte), it is much lighter. Giada and Valerie are still my favorites, but I love them all! All 5 polishes covered easily in 2 thin coats, and this is obviously shown with top coat since Iris is shiny. I think I am going to get rid of Chemis-tree, it is the same shade as Valerie with the same shimmer…but I love the coarser glitter in Valerie while Chemis-tree just looks grey and muted with the fine glitter. Voila!

Sorry about the one-photo-per-swatch today, I ran out of time and honestly the photos in my lightbox didn’t look great for these! I need better lights. Also, I have begun packing to move to St Louis, so if I stop posing regularly it’s because moving has taken over my life! Also…this is my final swatch test post! It is back to nail art on Monday 🙂

I knew I wanted to make beautiful tropical sea nails just before I left for my honeymoon to Hawaii. I also sweet talked my husband into watching Moana (for like the 20394830th time) in preparation, and somehow these nails came out looking like Moana ocean! I am pleased.

I love how these nails looked in person, but between the dark blue and the bright teal, in photos I ended up with lobster fingers! I’ve tried to somewhat color adjust for that, but I don’t know how successful I really way.

The double stamping (silver and white) looked fun, but there is a part of me that wonders if the mani would have looked better with just a single stamp? I will never know!

I am in Hawaii right now! Or, at least I should be. I am very excited. I was waiting to post these nails (which I painted back in December in honor of my cruise to the Caribbean) until the start of my next tropical vacation because I am a dork.

The design here was inspired by clairestelle8 and I honestly think I did a pretty decent job replicating her design! Unfortunately, the base gradient which looked really vibrant on my nails did not translate well in the photos. It isn’t pastel!

For the design itself, I had to hand-stamp each leaf, since I didn’t have a plate with thick enough frond leaves to work. Surprisingly, it didn’t take too long! Also, I didn’t like the idea of using a white border for flowers, so I used the darker of the blues instead, and I wish there was a tiny bit more delineation between the flower and the surroundings.

In my head, the name of this mani is all Shakespeare-ified (Wing’ed Love) but I figured adding an apostrophe would confuse everyone…and I left it in normal English. Anyway, today starts my Valentine’s manis and I wanted to do something with birds!

Basically, I found this small stamp I had never used (despite owning the plate for years) and wanted to create a mani around it. That is the two doves image on my middle finger. I ended up using birds from 3 different stamping plates and leaves from a fourth. So. Many. Stamps!

This mani also uses the first of the polishes that I won from the Nail Polish Canada holiday nail art challenge! I ended up with 21 new polish (omg) about 2/3 of which I adore and 1/3 of which I would never have picked. This is one of the ones I would not have gone for. This is Once in a Blue Moon by ORLY, and is actually a nice pale blue-grey color, and is a two-coater which is great. However…it is also a frost. Can the nail polish community at large just agree to stop making frosty polishes? There are brush strokes all over the place and I would much rather see this as a shimmer or metallic, or even a creme. Also, I hate the ORLY brushes, they are far too wide for my poor pinky nail! All-in-all, I don’t know that I am going to try very hard to keep this particular color…it might end up going to my sister.

I figured I couldn’t let Hanukkah pass without at least some type of nail art, so here we are! Dreidel nails.

This design was inspired by Emi’s Manis, but her’s came out MUCH better. I love the color combo and I glad I based mine off of what she did! The nails are the hebrew letters on the dreidel, a spinning top game that is played for pennies or candy (sometimes gelt, candy shaped like coins), where the letter facing up decides what you do with your coins/candy.

I didn’t actually get to play dreidel this year, since I will have spent over half of Hanukkah traveling to interviews (and I don’t have a dreidel in my apartment, I don’t think). The letter’s don’t look quite right, we are going to ignore how small my nun is (pinky), and how fat my gadol is (ring)…and how weirdly shaped my shin is (pointer). As I said, the inspiration photo is just much much better, go check it out! Although I am going to blame the lack of thin lines on how cold it is and so my polish is all gloopy!

That’s all for today, and for Hanukkah. But, if you are feeling awesome can you please head over to Nail Polish Canada here and vote for “flightofwhimsy” so I can win some polish? If you click on my photo there it will take you to my post for Friday, but they are some pretty adorable nutcracker nails 😀 Thank you!!!

I did two VERY similar manicures…one on each hand. Mostly because mutlichromes are fun and I at this point have too many of them :-p.

The other mani is shiftier, and will go up next week so that I don’t bore you guys with the same manicure twice, more-or-less. This one, although it shifts less, I actually think I like better (and that’s unusual)! The colors came together really well.

I started with a green multichrome base (this one shifts from an emerald green to a bright teal, and a deeper blue at steep angles) and then used advanced stamping (aka coloring in the design on the stamper) to add the leaves. Two of the leaf colors are multichromes, although the golden-brown one barely shifts (its mostly a gold to greenish-grey, but it was already a grey-gold to start with). The other one shifts from copper to brown, which is again, not a super big shift. I like it anyway!

I will admit to staring at my nails and moving them around trying to capture the right angles for these photos…but I just gave up and picked ones that looked pretty and glow-y instead. So, pretend that they can shift at least a little? Meh. Still pretty! Now if only it would COOL DOWN around here…it should not be 80 degrees out in Philly in mid-October!

This is what happens when I come home in a rush from out-of-state and need to be in the hospital the next day but am currently wearing something brightly colored and intricately patterned. Basically, this is just sad.

I usually plan out my manis a little in advance…just in terms of color or inspiration or a specific stamp to use. In this case I had a boring pink that I was going to stamp with white and grey…and decided not to use pink. So I of course grabbed the darkest grey I own. Which was a terrible idea, because my nails looked like Wolverine claws!

I tried to fix that by adding a layer of white-tinted polish with gold flecks in it, but it only ended up looking super uneven. So then I knew I NEEDED a full-coverage stamp, but I couldn’t do black (which would have looked nice) because that is far too dark for the hospital. I settled on a lighter grey. And honestly, its ok but it certainly isn’t good! Yikes.

Sorry this is so drab, I wish I had something prettier to show today. It gets better later next week, I promise! Although, since I am taking an 8-hour long exam tomorrow, grey nails seem fitting :-/. Cya on the other side!

For Day 22 of the 31 Day Challenge, the theme was “song”. I’ve always had trouble with this one, since I can never decide if I want to do music in general, or the theme of a song, or something about the music video.

This year, I decided to be inspired by both the artist (P!nk) and the visuals of the song. I went with the song Just Give Me A Reason, which is depressing but I love the vocals! In the music video, P!nk sports her pale pink/white hair with a pink ribbon, and is wearing a pale pink lace dress. There are also a number of scenes featuring an off-white mattress. I just went with it!

My pinky, pointer, and thumb are all intended to be different bits of lace. My ring finger is a mattress (maybe, if you squint) although I should probably have used the quilting method. My middle finger is intended to be her hair, with the ribbon. I went a bit dark with the pink shade in the hair, but I still like it!

This mani is brought to you by clear stampers (seriously, I double stamped/shadow stamped all the nails except my middle finger which is TRIPLE stamped)! And too many stamping plates. The lace is from plates BP-L008, BP-L020, and EdM01. The hair and ribbon are from BM-S108 and BM-317. The mattress is from BM-209. Yikes! Hope you enjoyed, and go listen to the song!

This might be the worst mani I’ve done in recent history. Like, total epic and utter fail. I am embarrassed to post this but let it stand as a lesson: Do Not Pair Nude and Awkward Golds!!!!

I couldn’t even bear to wear this particular mani for 24 hours they were soo terrible. Ugh. Once I had done one hand with the pale gold/silvery polish I hated it so much I covered the other hand with a more yellow-toned gold. It too looked awful (although to me maybe sightly less terrible).

Mistakes I made here: trying (again) to use metallic polish over tape. It never comes off correctly. Trying to use a soft gold color over a pink-based nude (a rose gold would have worked, or a yellow-based nude).

Turns out the art I was trying to replicate by Marine Loves Polish was done with nail tattoos Go figure. Win some, lose some! On a good note, the 31 Day Challenge begins on Friday! Stay tuned for some of my recent BEST work 😀

I painted my nails blue…and then got stuck. What to do with blue nails? There were SO MANY OPTIONS. So, I turned to one of the queens of nail art, and tried to loosely duplicate a mani 😀

I started off trying to re-create the sea turtle mani by yagala, but got sidetracked. I used stamps instead of free handing…and then decided that if I was going to be wearing gloves over this mani (which I will be, yay for lab work!), that I should probably steer clear of lots of 3D bits. So I added a glittery topper. And then some silver. And I kinda just had fun with it!

The base color is Over the Moon by Color Club, one of the famed halo hues polishes. I bought it to replace Nfu Oh 065, which has dried to an unusable glop despite being over half full. I have to say though, I am not disappointed in Over the Moon! I used two thin coats here, but I probably could have gotten away with one. The polish is ever so slightly thick, but not hard to work with. And it is holo-y as ANYTHING. Oh my god.

I need to convince myself not to go hunting for the rest of the halo hues polishes…so far I only own this blue one and the silver (Harp On It). And they are both amazing! Gah.